Three Little Words

When the book came in the mail, I lifted it from the Amazon box and gazed at it with pride. There on the cover were three little words that warmed my heart: By Laura Levine.

I’ve been a professional writer for more than 35 years, and never have three words meant so much to me.

Growing up in a Jewish home filled with books, I knew early on I wanted to be a writer like P.G. Wodehouse, Sam Levenson or my all-time favorite — Agatha Christie. I’d been a rabid Agatha Christie fan ever since I was 10, when my Uncle Hymie introduced me to her. An Orthodox Jew and talmudic scholar, my uncle was the last person you’d expect to curl up with Miss Marple. But that he did. And he passed on his love of Agatha Christie to me.

Someday, I vowed, I’d have my name on the cover of a book, just like my beloved Agatha.

But I never did write that novel. Not right away. When I first started out, I was an advertising copywriter, a fairly anonymous position. No “written by” credits on commercials. And more often than not, after the clients got through tinkering with my copy, I barely recognized it anyway.

The clients loved to tinker. I remember spending months waiting for the honchos at General Mills to decide whether Count Chocula and Frankenberry — two cereal characters I’d created for them — were “monstrously delicious” or “ghoulishly good.” More months were spent debating whether Count Chocula should have fangs or more conventional orthodontia. (The fangs lost.)

Eventually, I got tired of writing stories that ended in the words “void where prohibited by law,” and decided to give showbiz a try. After churning out what seemed like dozens of spec scripts, I finally wrote one that sold — to “Laverne & Shirley.” For days, I drove around town singing the theme song to that show. (Extra credit for those of you who remember that it started: “Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer, Incorporated!”)

So there I was, happy as a clam, never dreaming that when I showed up for the taping of my script, there’d be only two of my original jokes left. That’s the way it works in television. Rewriting is the name of the game. In my 18 years in sitcoms, I considered myself lucky if 60 percent of any given script with my name on it was actually written by me.

At least with “Laverne & Shirley,” my script got ripped to shreds from afar. But when you’re on staff, the process is far more painful. You have to sit there and watch them eviscerate your script, trying not to strangle the producer as, one by one, your beloved jokes bite the dust.

No, staff writing is not exactly a ride in the country. (Unless the country you’re riding in is Afghanistan.) The writers’ rooms I worked in were usually dank holes in the bowels of the studios, with frayed carpeting and fearless battalions of mice rattling around in the walls, just waiting to grab a bite of your breakfast bagel.

Often I was the only woman in the room. And there were always a few guys on staff, Type-A barracudas, who labored under the mistaken notion that the louder they shouted out their jokes, the funnier they would be. How, I asked myself, could anyone think with all that shouting going on?

Sometimes, when we were struggling over a joke at two in the morning, I’d find myself thinking of Agatha Christie. I’d once read that she used to plot out her stories taking long walks on the moors. I wanted to take long walks on the moors. So what if I didn’t exactly know what a moor was? I wanted to be on one! I wanted to be anywhere but that rathole of a writers’ room.

Eventually, I got my wish. When I reached the stage in life where my gray hairs outnumbered my writing credits, the phone stopped ringing. I was old (“old” being defined in Hollywood as anyone over 27). I was a showbiz “untouchable,” and I didn’t mind a bit. At last I was free to write in silence.

Once again, I remembered Agatha. Why not try writing a mystery? And so I did. Just like Agatha, I plotted it out taking long walks. I strolled along Westwood Boulevard, past the bagel shop and the copy shop and Dr. Babajanian’s painless dentistry offices. OK, so it wasn’t the moors, but at last, I could hear myself think.

I found an agent who liked my book and an editor who published it. And what’s more, they didn’t change a thing. Oh, maybe a word here and there. But otherwise, it was just as I’d written it. And now, here it was in my hand, its bright pink cover beaming up at me. With those three little words I’d often dreamed of: By Laura Levine.

After 35 years, at last they were true.